Another major textile product that the RAC sold in Upper Guinea was a linen known by them as sletias, after Silesia, the central European region of the Habsburg Empire where these cloths were made (see map 2.1).5 Linen manufacture for export to world markets had been organized in rural areas there since the sixteenth century. But in this case, and in contrast to Indian cotton manufacturers, the producers hardly benefitted at all from their basic contributions to this labor-intensive process. Production of linen cloth began with the families harvesting home-grown flax, a fibrous grass that they then steeped, crushed, beat, and brushed to break down the stalks and soften the fiber for spinning.6 Both men and women worked at preparing flax fibers and spinning them into thread, but the bleaching of thread was done by women of the household.
Deprivations these workers experienced under increasing pressures to produce more linens for export were dramatically more onerous than the experiences of their counterparts who produced cotton textiles in India. Silesian workers were serfs and peasants under the control of their feudal landlords and bound by a set of harshly extractive obligations and taxes. Male weavers, for example, had to pay fees to their lord just to be able to continue working at their trade, and they owed other fees for their marriages, for having children, and even for death. It was the lords, not the weavers, who entered into direct commercial agreements with English and Dutch merchants, and it was they who set the conditions of production. Yet despite the servile status and low incomes of workers, the volume of Silesian linen output and sales rose steadily over the seventeenth century. Workers resisted these miserable and worsening conditions by refusing to meet their obligations. At times, they even resorted to violent uprisings. One such instance in the late seventeenth century had to be put down by military force. Meanwhile, landlords were able to keep up production by settling even more desperate landless immigrant spinners and weavers onto their estates. However, the severe constraints of this feudal arrangement led to a contraction and stagnation of Silesian linen manufacture in the eighteenth century—at the time when British textile manufacture was embarking on fundamental technological changes.7
Of the RAC exports to Africa that were made domestically in England, woolen textiles were the most steady and significant. Broadcloth, a mainstay of English weaving, was inappropriate for far-off tropical markets because it was too heavy and too high in price. Lighter, cheaper woolens, however, served better in the Guinea trade, among them the simple plain weave textiles known as Welsh plains and bays, which the company bought in modest quantities on advance contracts (see figure 2.1). It was, above all, the development of a product line called “new draperies,” copying a major export of the Low Countries already in the sixteenth century, that allowed English woolens to become a successful commodity in warmer climates, including on the West African coast. These textiles, known generically as serges, had a sturdy, combed-wool warp and a soft, carded-wool weft. Their particular names varied widely based on the specifications and locality of their production. The two that were most important to the RAC were the perpetuana and the say, both of them recognized and highly valued on the Guinea Coast for being hard wearing, lightweight, and relatively cheap woolens.8
FIGURE 2.1 European floor loom and weaver. Denis Diderot, et al., Encyclopédie (Paris, 1762). Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC.
Supplies of these new draperies came to the RAC in London mostly from the towns and countryside of Devonshire in southwestern England, where they were made by smallholders or landless artisans, many of whom worked seasonally—either independently or under putting-out arrangements with merchants in Exeter (see map 2.1). In the putting-out system, a merchant would sell or lend raw wool to a male weaver who then arranged for it to be cleaned, prepared, and spun into yarn. Shipments of Irish wool with the long fibers requisite for spinning strong worsted thread for weaving serges came in on the northern coast of the peninsula to be carried overland to Exeter. The Irish sources of the weavers’ basic raw material thus put merchants in control of weavers’ fortunes. Wool with shorter fibers for the weft thread arrived via the coasting trade from the southeast, mainly Kent and Sussex, as well as from around the local countryside. Women and children were the ones who engaged in the primary work of preparing wool and spinning it, and skill levels, as well as wages, varied widely. Then, once a weaver wove the cloth, he sold his yardage either in the serge market or directly back to the merchant who had supplied the wool. It would then be the merchant who had the cloth finished and dyed.9
The RAC entered the process at this point. Serges came to them undyed and unfinished, and the company arranged with either an agent in Exeter or a representative in London to manage the transport of their woolen goods to London, where they contracted with specialists in the city to dye, set, press, and pack them for export. Perpetuanas were hard wearing and relatively cheap, and according to over twenty-seven years of reported figures, the company exported more than 170,000 pieces of them to the Guinea Coast. RAC officials, determined to maintain quality controls necessary to prevent spinners and weavers from pilfering wool or thread, instituted standards specifying a certain weight per measured length of woven yardage. The company exported says as well, especially during their first twenty years, when records show they shipped two thousand to three thousand pieces annually. RAC agents on the Gold Coast complained when lack of perpetuanas and says resulted in a falloff in their trade. They also faced keen competition there from the Dutch, who were adept at maintaining their own supplies of serges even into the first years of the 1700s.10
Among the RAC exports in the general category of metalwares, its second-most important category of goods, bar iron was the most significant, especially in the second half of the seventeenth century. For example, company records show that of the thirty-five vessels the company sent to Africa in 1685, twenty-nine of them carried the iron bars that supplemented the output of African smelting furnaces. During this period, at least, they did not export any English-made iron. Instead, regular supplies of bar iron came to them from importers in London who specialized in the Baltic trade and who also were shareholders in the company. Export iron circulated in trading networks as intermediate or semifinished goods, which meant that producers worked it into hammered iron bars that could later be turned into tools or other implements elsewhere, sometimes an ocean away. The RAC’s main source of iron in the seventeenth century was Sweden (see map 2.1), where ironworkers produced bar iron for export in the form of bars of standardized dimensions and weight. In the mid-1680s, the company’s contract with their supplier stipulated